AWS is looking to capitalise on demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities across the Asia-Pacific region, with some offerings now available for partners and customers for the first time.

The cloud giant last week announced that its IoT TwinMaker, Amplify Studio, Aurora Serverless V2, SageMaker Serverless Inference and Textract Queries are all now generally available.

AWS APJ chief technologist Olivier Klein said in a media briefing last Friday that the launches would foster innovation among partners and customers across the region, with use cases like helping mitigate bushfires in Australia, accelerating vaccine development and personalised shopping experiences and maximising productivity for farmers and in other agricultural technology scenarios.

“In 2022, we are seeing greater adoption of machine learning in Asia Pacific with organisations implementing [a] wide variety of use cases including recommendation engines, scientific research, logistics, farming, and fraud detection. By putting machine learning in the hands of every builder, and bringing more services to the region, we are committed to enabling our customers across the region to develop new, innovative solutions that drive business productivity, improve lives, and protect our planet,” Klein said.

“We will continue to accelerate our pace of innovation by inventing entirely new technologies and bringing cloud infrastructure even closer to customers across Asia Pacific. This will help organisations of all sizes and industries to transform their customer experiences, modernise their applications, and deliver new services at scale.”

Klein said AWS would also look to continue investing in its partner network in the region, with the general availability of the offerings, allowing channel partners to deploy the technologies to end customers.

“When we say we listen to our customers, that also includes partners, and whatever they tell us we can do for them straight away, as well as whatever they want to integrate,” he said.

Klein said machine learning was a “very big topic” lately for AWS’s customers, specifically involving training machine learning models and making predictions from that model. That would be addressed by AWS SageMaker Serverless Inference, which would enable predictions and inferences without a server.

Amazon Textract, which has been live since 2019, now also includes Queries, which can allow users to specify data or information from a document using a natural language query and without having to write an API.

“We’re bringing natural language processing capabilities together with these document processing capabilities, marrying them together, and now you have customers across all kinds of industries,” Klein added.

“This is especially useful in banking, healthcare [and] public sector insurance, but any kind of business probably needs document processing capabilities.”

Also launched in Asia-Pacific in January is AWS Panorama, specifically in its Sydney and Singapore zones, which is a machine learning appliance and software development kit to provide “computer vision” to a customer’s on-premises cameras to make automated predictions. The service automates monitoring and visual inspection tasks, like evaluating manufacturing quality, finding bottlenecks in industrial processes, and assessing worker safety within their facilities.

Klein added the new offerings will be supported by 10 new local zone expansions across the region, including the recently announced zones in Perth and Brisbane.

“One of the things that we keep doing is building out our infrastructure footprint in Asia Pacific and this is to give our customers choices where they run their workloads, but also make it better for their end customers reducing the latency that we have really looking at flexibility on where they run their applications,” he said.